Yes, the big things in the world are always done by just a man—one man—one strong personality. History in its times of crisis cried out for a man. . . . You may gather all the wisdom in the world in a Parliament chamber, but you will never get action out of a Parliament chamber. One man has got to lead.
Last week the man who spoke these words was dead, having given up the job of leading almost 23 years ago. For the speaker was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The man who heard the Kaiser's words was a U.S. journalist, William Bayard Hale of the New York Times. They were aboard the imperial yacht Hohenzollern, at anchor in the fjord of Bergen, Norway, one July evening in 1908, and the Kaiser stalked the deck in the gold braid of an Admiral of the German High Seas Fleet. He spoke English, in which he was fluent, and sometimes he leaned close to his interviewer and lowered his voice confidentially, sometimes he raised his one good arm and shook his forefinger under Hale's nose. Hale suppressed that interview, which was one of the Kaiser's most famed indiscretions. Reporter Hale's son, William Harlan Hale, printed it in 1934. It was of historical interest last week.
Of Warlords and Statesmen. The tide of Teutonic conquest had flowed and ebbed for 2,000 years before it caught up with Wilhelm Hohenzollern and left him stranded when it briefly receded. The Warlord of Potsdam, as he talked of history's cry for leaders, must have thought of other German warlords who had ridden the tide of conquest when it flowed. He must have thought, as Adolf Hitler so often thinks, of the fear which has caused other peoples to fight against the tide for 2,000 years of history.
Even before Julius Caesar's time, the Germans were pushing against their western boundaries, and although Caesar drove them across the Rhine, the Romans never felt secure against them. The Kaiser must have thought of Germany's first warlord, whom the Romans called Arminius and the Germans Hermann der Cherusker, who in the First Century ambushed three legions of Romans in the Teutoburg Forest and ended Roman efforts to conquer Germany. Later on the Romans built an early Maginot Line, Limes Germanicus, between the Rhine and the Danube. But the Ro mans made the mistake of recruiting Germans for their legions, and the leader of one of these fifth columns, Odovacar the Goth, overthrew the Roman Empire in 476.
As he paced the deck of the imperial yacht that summer evening in 1908, the Kaiser must have recalled Clovis the Frank, who carved a kingdom out of Gaul and South Germany in the 5th Century; and of Pepin the Young and his bastard son Charles Martel, statesmen rather than warlords, who founded the Carolingian Dynasty, the greatest ever to rule Germany. And of Charles the Great Carolingian, whose Empire stretched from the Elbe to the Ebro.